Content Marketing & Distribution

According to the Content Marketing Institute content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Another way of thinking of content marketing is the “art of communicating without selling.” You want to provide information that makes consumer more intelligent. And you do this with the intent of changing or enhancing consumer behavior.
Based on a study from the Content Marketing Institute, B2B and B2C companies’ content marketing goals for 2016 are to generate more leads and increase sales, and increase sales and improve customer retention/loyalty, respectively. Both types of companies challenges and priorities are producing engaging content and measuring its effectiveness (and therefore, understanding what is and is not effective).
To achieve these goals, B2B companies are primarily using social media (other than blogs), case studies, and blogs. However, they’re only rating case studies to be in the top three most effective tactics. In-person events and webinars/webcasts rank first and second, respectively.
B2C companies are primarily using social media content (other than blogs), illustrations/photos, and e Newsletters to reach these goals.
What is interesting is that B2B and B2C companies are using, on average, 13 and 12 tactics, respectively, to reach their content marketing goals. Comparing the list of tactics employed to how strong companies rank their effectiveness, one could wonder if using fewer tactics in order to allocated more marketing funds to more effective tactics would be a better use of marketing dollars.
If we look at social media tactics, specifically, you’ll see that (not surprisingly) LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are the most commonly used platforms for B2B businesses with their effectiveness ranking in corresponding order aside for Facebook, which is outranked by YouTube and SlideShare.
Social media platform usage and effectiveness for B2C companies is also not surprising.
The Content Marketing Institute found in its study that the following content marketing tactics are trending in 2016: